On 17 March, physicists working on the BICEP2 experiment, based at the South Pole, announced that they had glimpsed gravitational waves – ripples in the fabric of spacetime – dating back to the universe’s birth.

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The discovery also allows us to peer back in time further than anyone thought possible. That could have all kinds of knock-on effects for our understanding of the universe, perhaps even helping to shore up one of the most exciting, and baffling, ideas in cosmology&colon; the multiverse.